Chapter 17 Mille-Feuille #2
“No, he wrote for children’s TV.” She names the show, a broadcast populated by puppets, so iconic that even I, sans offspring, am aware of it.
“Every so often they’d need a kid for a segment and I’d get hauled into the studio for the day.
” She laughs. “It was amazing, now that I think about it, but at the time it was just strange. The greasy pancake makeup, and the costume changes, and the hot lights. They were the first ones to put my hair in a side braid, and it became my lewk. And to see my dad there, in a skyscraper in New York, was surreal. I was so proud of him.”
“I’m sure he’s more proud of you.”
“He would be,” Simone agrees. “But he died when I was six. He was going to a broadcasters’ convention in Chicago, but he never
made it. Car crash on the way to LaGuardia. My mom never admitted it, but I know it was intentional. I saw the death certificate,
and I remember looking up suicide in Webster’s.”
Ah, there’s the rub, I think. All of my women have something sad about them—as who doesn’t, but they have some special thorn
of pain they carry in their core, no matter how bright their smiles. I don’t know why I’m drawn to damaged birds, but I have
accepted it’s my DNA. Concealed by her brave red clothes and authorial bravado, this must be Simone’s wound.
“I’m sorry, Simone,” I say. “Do you want to tell me more about it?”
“Not really,” she says. “But thank you.”
She sounds dreamy, which means it is the perfect time to ask the question I have been waiting to introduce all night. “Then
tell me, how is it going with our pal the rumrunner?”
There is a pause, and I wonder if Simone has fallen asleep and whether I should joggle my shoulder to rouse her when she says,
“Actually, I’ve been working on something a little different.”
I feel a dash of alarm. “What do you mean?” I ask.
That is when Simone tells me—I can barely believe it!—that although our publisher is generously footing the bill for the Canyon
Ranch for writers so she can produce an historical novel, and although I have contributed my own time, energy, and creative
largesse by coaching Simone at length about our rumrunner’s story—hours upon hours listening to her develop that idea; saying Mmmhmmm and Home run! and Now you’re cooking as she babbles on about dual storylines; nodding attentively as she breaks the one-page synopsis into parts and chapters;
holding an expression of deep focus as she says But what if?
But what if? But what if? . . . despite all of this, Simone is disobediently, stubbornly, willfully writing something else.
Something she has been keeping from me, despite my having sacrificed my own firepower to develop our historical novel about the rumrunner.
Now, with the temerity to actually look proud of herself, Simone opens her phone to read to me the proposal for the atrocity
she is contemplating writing, a familiar atrocity entitled The Darling Factor. Which features a graduate program like mine, with a cohort like mine, with a woman who commits suicide as my original darling,
my fiancée, Becky, did . . . Except in Simone’s perverse, twisted, derivative “thriller,” it’s possible the woman did not take her own life but was murdered.
“This may go nowhere,” Simone adds. “And I’m sorry about the rumrunner—it’s a great concept, and I might return to him for
the next book. But—and I was kind of afraid to tell you this—for whatever reason, I didn’t feel quite right about it. Maybe
it’s too close, or not baked yet, or—I was supposed to be doing something different. And then, after my poor novelist Amelie
committed suicide, this came to me like a thunderbolt. You know how that is. So rare. I’ve started working on it, and for
the first time in a long time I actually feel plugged in. So . . . that’s what I’m doing this week at the retreat. Walking
out over the abyss. Ta-da!” She flourishes her arms, then sets her phone on the nightstand and snuggles back into my armpit.
“William? Are you asleep?”
I am not asleep.
“We have a problem, Simone,” I say.
“What?”
“Appropriation.”
“What?”
I shift my shoulder from beneath Simone, so her head thumps onto her own pillow.
She heard me. She knows what it means. Everyone in publishing knows what appropriation means.
It’s our industry’s hottest buzzword—and greatest fear.
Once upon a time, it was considered perfectly, well, appropriate to write about somebody else’s life, another person’s experience.
We called that act of imaginative empathy fiction.
Now, however, an author has to be very careful that he—especially if he is a he, and especially if he is a white he of a
certain age—does not trespass on another writer’s story. If he attempts to picture life, anecdotes, moments, from outside
his own culture or gender, it can choke the oxygen from the writer who is rightfully entitled to it from birth, from having
lived those experiences.
It’s true that we white male writers have enjoyed the home court advantage in the literary world, for several centuries, in
fact. I acknowledge the importance—the necessity—of making space for others to tell their stories. I’ve also thought the concept
of appropriation was complete horseshit: If we wrote only what happened to us, wouldn’t that be autobiography? What would
happen to fiction? What about the noble attempt to get out of one’s skin and into another, attempting to understand what it’s
like to be human from another person’s point of view, gender, ethnicity? And thereby building understanding and commonality
among us? Why else would I write from the female point of view but to show my great love for women? About appropriation, if
it wouldn’t end my career, I would have said: Bah humbug.
Until now. When it is happening to me.
“You know precisely what I mean,” I say to Simone. “We’ve discussed literary thievery. I will not allow you to appropriate
my life for fiction.”
“William! What are you talking about!”
But that furtive tone is back in her voice.
“My fiancée? Her suicide? At my graduate program? The Darling Factor? Are you clueless or just malevolent? This is a thousand times worse than Billy Faulkner taking careless credit for a writing
adage. You are deliberately repurposing my personal tragedy for your novel.”
Simone sits up. She switches on the lamp and peers at me. “William. You can’t be serious.”
“Serious as a lawsuit, Simone.”
“What?”
“You heard me.”
“You’re really going there? I don’t appreciate being threatened.”
I sit up too. “It’s not a threat. It’s a promise.” I get out of bed and start to dress.
“Where are you going?” she asks.
“For a walk,” I say.
“It’s two thirty in the morning.”
“I need some air. There’s less danger to me out there than there is in here.”
“What is that supposed to mean?” She has the audacity to sound exasperated.
“Out there, there may be stalkers. Or bears. In here I’m trapped with a vampire.”
“William!” Simone laughs and shakes her head. “What are you even talking about?” she says again. “Stop. Please, stop a minute and look at me. Do you think you’re the only writer who ever went to
grad school? I have my master’s, too, you know. Or that you’re the only person who ever lost somebody to suicide? In my college,
it was so common that they offered a four-point-oh GPA to the surviving roommate, to compensate for the trauma!”
“We are not talking about apocryphal, fictitious people, Simone,” I say. “We are talking about your stealing my personal pain.”
“It’s not just your pain. It’s mine too. I just lost a novelist from my workshop. Did you forget that? I went to the Hamptons
straight from her memorial!”
I don’t bother answering this. Of course I remember that sad lost-soul writer. The world is full of these women. What does
Simone think I have been trying to do my whole life, via the Darlings and such? All I do is help. I step into my shoes.
“Oh my God. William. Wait. Please.” Simone gets up and walks toward me, unabashed or unaware that she’s naked, and again I admire her despite myself. Despite her effrontery. Who does she think she is? She puts a hand on my arm, and I look down at it.
“I’m sorry if I triggered you,” she says. “I didn’t mean to. I know you suffered a terrible loss. But I have to write what
I have to write, you know? It’s the number one rule of writing. You have to be free to write about what’s most important to
you.”
“No, Simone,” I say, “the number one rule of writing is to write what you know. This is mine. My territory.” I bend toward her, raise my eyebrows for emphasis. “I hate a thief.”
I remove her hand with my own, very deliberately, as if I’m unbuckling a seat belt, and place it back at her side.
“I am going for a walk,” I announce. “When I come back, I’m going to sleep. You have kept me up late enough as it is, and
lest you forget, I am still on tour. We can discuss this further or never revisit it again, as you wish. But know this, Simone:
As fond as I am of you—and until tonight I had extremely high hopes for us—if you write this book, our story ends here.”
“William,” she says. She’s shaking her head. There are tears in her eyes. “That’s not fair.”
“You are hardly qualified to speak of fairness in this moment, Simone,” I say. “Think about it while I’m gone. Sleep on it.
Let me know your decision in the morning.”
She squares her chin. The flush has risen on her face, her breastbone, hiding her freckles like a rising storm front obscures
stars.
“I’m a writer,” she says. Her voice is wobbling, but I can’t tell whether it is passion or fear. “So are you. I’d expect you
to be more understanding.”
“I’d expect you to have more character,” I say.
I open the door. “I was just about to tender an invitation,” I say. “To my island in Maine, after my tour. I had a plan. I
calendarized it. I wanted to let you into my home, writing sanctuary, my private life. But I can’t be with a woman I can’t trust. Think it over, Simone. It’s your choice. You decide.”
I leave and stand outside the door. I hear nothing. Simone is not crying. I am annoyed. These tactics would have worked with
the others. Not with Simone. Damn her. How could I have been mistaken? All this investment, wasted. But it is possible I am
overreacting, especially after the shock of hearing her plot. Perhaps by morning, Simone will have seen the error of her ways.
I walk down the stairs and out into the night, as I said I would do; Simone, like the others, will come to understand that
I always mean what I say.